This Little Computer Tries to Be a Book

Electronics companies have struggled in vain for years to come
up with a replacement for the humble printed book.

Most were too expensive, required a Ph.D. in computer science
to operate, or otherwise failed to improve on what is, after all,
an extraordinarily effective form of random access memory.

Franklin Electronic Publishers Inc. of Mount Holly, N.J., may
be on the right track with its Digital Book System. The
calculator-size device is inexpensive at about $130 and can hold
the equivalent of 40 Bibles stored on a pair of computer chips.

About the size of a 9-volt battery, each read-only memory chip
is an electronic "book" that fits into a slot on the back of the
DBS-2. The chips vary in price from about $30 to $130. Similar
chips can turn the DBS-2 into a portable game machine.

A sample chip included with the DBS-2 pumps orchestra music
through its earphone jack and displays graphics of exploding
fireworks on its one-by-four-inch screen. Because the four-line
liquid crystal display can be cumbersome when wading through as
much as 400 megabytes of computer data, built-in software makes it
easy to look up information through a variety of indexing methods.

*****
Vintage Information

Where do those features come in handy? Try the cluttered aisles
of Spec's Liquor Store in downtown Houston, a wine lover's paradise.

To ferret out the best buys, I used to bring a cheat sheet of
rankings from wine magazines. I'd scan the wine racks for a label
that matched my own notes - and I'd usually go home with a mystery
vintage when nothing matched.

Franklin's DBS-2 makes even this task a lot easier. At the low
end of 40-odd titles available for the system, Parker's Wine Guide
includes reviews of just about every wine and vintage available in
the United States.

Type in the name of the wine - Chateau Chasse-Spleen, say - and
after a slight delay, Robert Parker's ratings for vintages of this
fine Bordeaux pop on the screen. Choose a vintage and you see that
Parker finds the '89 to be "generous," "smoky," and "chewy," among
other things.

Curious about why Parker used this last adjective to describe a
liquid? A built-in glossary says "chewy" refers to wines with "a
rather dense, viscous texture from a high glycerine content."

Other features include vintage charts and maps of the world's
major wine regions. Using a variety of cross-reference techniques,
you can search for wines by region, name, vintage and rating. …

The rest of this article is only available to active members of Questia

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.